Enjoy your last day off before the new school year starts tomorrow. No worries, we have you covered with these Labor Day My themed morning reads:

• Where the Five-Day Workweek Came From (The Atlantic)
• People Are Quitting Their Jobs. That’s Good News. (Fiscal Times)
• Boomer Wealth Dented by Mortgages Poses U.S. Risk (Bloomberg)
• Why you need a healthy amount of uncertainty in an economy (Quartz)
• A Look at Income Inequality, Hour by Hour (Real Time Economics)
• The Changing Face of Temporary Employment (NYT) see also More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’ (NYT)
• A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93% (Pew)
• 8 Qualities That Makes Great Bosses Unforgettable (LinkedIn)
• At Work, Every Friday Should Be a Summer Friday (Science of Us)
• Gorgeous Aerial Shots of Beaches, Taken While Hanging From a Helicopter (Wired)

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

Who knew that one of the best made-for-Labor-Day speeches in U.S. history would be delivered by a chief executive? And who could have guessed that the summer’s major labor story would not be about a CEO saving the jobs of his workers but about the workers saving the job of their CEO?

This is the wonder of the happy-ending tale of Market Basket, the New England grocery chain. Most of its 25,000 non-unionized workers walked out to get their deposed CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas, reinstated as the company’s leader. Last week, they won. ….

…Let’s not put too fine a point on it: What’s really going on here is that our historically high wealth concentration is interacting with our historically low firewalls between money and politics, providing capital with a massive weapon against labor. Those supporting the currently skewed distribution of wealth and power can buy not just the research results they want, but the policies. As political economist Suresh Naidu put it, “In a thoroughly marketized world, the wealthy can purchase educational reform …think-tanks, legislative language…”

In what way can courage make a difference here? The first step is forcefully and relentlessly calling out the reality of these power imbalances, as Franklin Roosevelt did in his 1936 reelection bid. ….

“If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.”

Very true unless you can cheat and not pay your taxes in the US and enjoy the benefits. Low personal taxes and low corporate taxes. Let these guys that want to move their companies overseas pay the personal taxes in those countries. That would put a stop to corporate cheats.

The link below paints a story very similar to the one John Bogle painted in his Book THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM. Bogle’s message was that America has moved from an economy where companies were managed for the benefit of owners to an economy where companies are managed for the benefit of upper management. Bogle calls our current system managerial capitalism.

“Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients—which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives—reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity.”

The Harvard Business Review lays the problem at the feet of stock buy backs. Personally I think this is also one of the main reasons, but it is just one of the reasons, there are others detailed in Bogle’s book.

On another note I used the Black–Scholes model for a number of years when my trading was (much) more active and was never even aware there were higher order derivatives much less how many there were: So, what’s your Zomma, mama?

In mathematical finance, the Greeks are the quantities representing the sensitivity of the price of derivatives such as options to a change in underlying parameters on which the value of an instrument or portfolio of financial instruments is dependent. The name is used because the most common of these sensitivities are often denoted by Greek letters.

Is September 1st the end of summer and the start of the Fall season? Depends on where you live!
————–Why do Australian seasons start on the 1st of the month?

…

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Best Answer

* Au T answered 7 years ago

In countries such as the UK, Denmark, Ireland and Australia the seasons are simply decided according to the Roman calendar, with the seasons decided by the hottest / coldest quarters of the year and beginning on the first of the month.

So Autumn – March 1st
Winter – June 1st
Spring – September 1st
Summer December 1st

and reverse for the opposite hemisphere.

For countries such as the United States, the seasons are determined Astrologically – and begin at the solstice and equinoxes. So spring begins when the days hit equal length then get longer, autumn when they hit equal length then get shorter etc.

Since the idea of four seasons was imposed on the rest of the world by northern Europeans and north Americans, there has been dispute about the start of the seasons. Most countries that subscribe to the four season idiocy start them on the solstices and equinoxes. Australia starts them on the first of the month.

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About Barry Ritholtz

Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

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